Two Stop Bits | larsbrinkhoff's comments

larsbrinkhoff 43 days ago | parent | on: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were ...
Welcome to the PDP-10, it's not for everyone.
Or if TOPS-20 feels to user friendly, try ITS. It's hardly for anyone.
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- bmonkey325 42 days ago
  Like owning Cisco Catalyst 6509 chassis.
  reply
larsbrinkhoff 82 days ago | parent | on: Atari Force, an Atari-themed DC Comic
Everyone knows about Captain Zilog, right?
https://www.zilog.com/captain_zilog/
- bmonkey325 81 days ago
  Wow. That’s a cool share. Definitely a John Byrne or Sal Buscema marvel vibe from the 80s
larsbrinkhoff 83 days ago | parent | on: Atari ST turns 40 today
To the teenage me, the Amiga 1000 looked gorgeous, but was an impossible dream due to its entry price. The Atari ST520 was affordable and still looked very nice.
larsbrinkhoff 92 days ago | parent | on: The PDP-10: history and replica
It's not a given that a "Unix" on a PDP-10 would have taken off like the PDP-11 version did. I believe the success of Unix was partially because it ran on an inexpensive and wildly popular mini.
Even as a PDP-10 fan, I have to admit that the PDP-10 was not exactly the wave of the future during the 1970s. It had a decent niche and a steadfast following, but sooner or later it would have disappeared in favor of 8-bit byte addressed computers.
- KODust 91 days ago
  Real alternative history territory here, but one path possible path is that it still have been attractive enough to port to the VAX, and we'd have ended up in roughly same place. Lots of handwaving and assumptions, of course.
  I'm not sure Unix failing to take off would have been bad. It would certainly be a different world.
  - larsbrinkhoff 91 days ago
    Some random thoughts. Writing a timesharing system for a computer with a 16-bit address space forced the Unix philosophy with many small single-purpose programs passing data between them. A timesharing system on a PDP-10 wouldn't have this constraint, and may well not have developed the Unix philosophy. Maybe that would have removed some of the appeal of "Unix-10".
    Second, the VAX grew from the PDP-11 as a 32-bit addressing extension. So porting from the PDP-11 to the VAX is rather natural and easy. In contrast, the PDP-10 is rather different from both the PDP-11 and VAX. Programs written in assembly language will not port over. If Bell labs would have developed a C language for the PDP-10, I wager it would have looked different and not have become popular in an 8-bit byte world.
    - bmonkey325 90 days ago
      Some forget that Unix started out on the pdp-7 which was 18-bit words so in some ways the architecture argument doesn’t really hold up. I think it’s more what machine were they could access.
      https://linfo.org/pdp-7.html#:~:text=The%20PDP-7%20was%20a%2....
      - KODust 90 days ago
        Yes, this is the thing -- it's clear that Ken Thompson valued simplicity, one reason being that he and a couple of other people could maintain the entire thing without a large support organization. Whether that would have survived the PDP-10, I'm not sure. But I suspect it would have have been recognizably Unix.
      - larsbrinkhoff 90 days ago
        PDP-7 Unix is even more cramped with a 12-bit address space per process.
        bmonkey325 90 days ago
        This version of Unix was all assembly code and not portable. Once they could move to a better machine I think they realized they didn’t want to write it again in assembly because porting could be difficult.
        larsbrinkhoff 89 days ago
        My argument is that the PDP-7 and PDP-11 possibly forced the Unix philosophy. I don't understand what you are arguing.
  - bmonkey325 91 days ago
    Is this the parallel universe where Mac won and Windows faded into obscurity. Amiga took over gaming and PlayStation and XBox never happened ? .
    Also. Steve Jobs lives…..
    - KODust 90 days ago
      Dave Cutler stayed at DEC, shipped popular workstations built with PRISM chips, Microsoft and IBM kissed and made up and we're all using Windows derived from OS/2 w/Presentation Manager today.
      - bmonkey325 90 days ago
        Put that way. In the hear and now, I realize we are in the darkest timeline.
larsbrinkhoff 92 days ago | parent | on: The PDP-10: history and replica
Foonly and Systems Concepts seemed to have a decent business, although their customer base was largely restricted to one each: Tymshare and Compuserve, respectively.
The PARC clones were two-off.
larsbrinkhoff 151 days ago | parent | on: Scenarios for Using Arpanet Computers (in 2025)
The title refers to https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc254.txt
larsbrinkhoff 158 days ago | parent | on: Ontario’s ICON Computer
Fleur looks like typical turtle graphics. Yep, Wikipedia lists a Logo implementation.
larsbrinkhoff 205 days ago | parent | on: Chaosnet host status - updated live
See https://chaosnet.net/global for more information.
larsbrinkhoff 218 days ago | parent | on: The vintage ROM database
The web site reads as if only PC compatibles have ROMs.
larsbrinkhoff 270 days ago | parent | on: Wasm translation of PDP-7 Space Travel
Space Travel was faithfully translated from PDP-7 assembly language to C, and then compiled to wasm. See https://github.com/mohd-akram/st for details.
- masswerk 263 days ago
  Great! Maybe add the controls and gameplay description to the hosted page, so that users may learn how to interact?
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